Strength in Weakness
by A Song of Purity
Summary: Set during the episode, "The Chase." When Azula shoots Iroh down, Aang and Katara offer to help, but Zuko refuses. They were weak to want to help him, and he would be weak to accept their help. And he was not weak. Slightly Zutara, oneshot.


**A/N: Popped into my head one day. Set during the episode The Chase. **

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**Strength in Weakness**

"_Leave!"_ he yelled at them. Why were they still here? Wasn't it bad enough that his uncle had been shot full of lightning? Had they stayed to mock him, to taunt him?

He thought they'd had Azula this time. She had been outnumbered six to one. There hadn't been any way she could possibly escape…how had this happened? How could he have _let_ this happen? _Uncle…_

He never should have suggested that he and Iroh go separate ways. They should've stuck together, then they wouldn't be in this mess, then Uncle might still be fine - !

"Zuko—"

He looked up, and he saw the waterbender coming towards him. Her eyes – had they always been so blue? – were wide with concern and fear and…and…he struggled to place the emotion. _Is that _compassion_? Is she worried about Uncle? _He glanced back down at his unmoving uncle.

But that couldn't possibly be right, he scorned himself as she opened her mouth to speak again. They were her enemies. _She has every right to let Uncle die, to let me die from grief after Uncle dies. _Then why would she fake compassion? He felt tears starting to well up in his eyes, and he was suddenly angry at himself. Crying was showing weakness, and he wasn't weak.

"_Zuko, I can help!"_ she cried out, and he wrenched his gaze away from his uncle to once more stare at her. He wanted to cry, he really did. He didn't need this wench and her pity. Her fake compassion.

"_LEAVE!"_ he bellowed, leaping to his feet in an onslaught of fury, and sweeping out at them with an arc of fire before he knew what he was doing. He managed to dissipate it before it reached them, and hurt the waterb…the Avatar's friends.

After the fire faded out of existence, he made eye contact with all of them for a second more.

The Avatar first – his gray eyes, normally naïve and cheerful (even when he was shooting fire at him, which Zuko admitted, irked him to no end), were now sad and thoughtful…and there it was.

Pity.

He didn't want their pity. Pity was for the weak, Zuko told himself.

The idiot with a half-sword and that thing he called a boomerang was staring at him with large, scared eyes, and still Zuko found pity in his gaze. Even the green-eyed girl, peculiarly staring at him as though she could see through him, dared to mock him with her _pity. _

Zuko was torn between laughing at them and killing them. He didn't want their pity. He didn't _need_ their pity.

Pity was for the weak.

But before they turned tail and fled, he caught the waterbender staring at him a second longer than the others, and he spun around, ready to incinerate her. He was suddenly furious again. They thought he was weak. He wasn't weak. He didn't need their help or their pity. He didn't need help from anyone, and it had made him strong.

But as he searched her gaze, ready to incriminate her, he found only compassion and concern and fear. Before he could search further into her oceanic eyes, she glanced back down at his uncle, bit her lip, and then ran after her friends, her long braid swinging behind her. But not before he caught a small tear trickling down her face.

Under other circumstances, he would have sneered at her. Crying was weak. _She_ must have been weak, to let an enemy like him see her cry like that. But…

He turned around, confused and angry and frustrated, and he screamed at the sky. It was a guttural roar, a vent for the conflicting emotions inside him.

She was supposed to be the _enemy_! Why had…why had she offered to help?

_It must have been a ploy. She was offering to help to make me give her my trust, and then they would turn around and stab me and Uncle in the back. That _must_ be it…what help could she have given me, anyways? That must be it…That must be…_

He threw himself to his knees, sobbing. The tears ran down his face and dripped to the dry ground, and he hated himself for crying. _Crying is weak,_ he told himself. _Crying is weak. Crying is…_

His mind brought up the image of a certain pair of blue eyes. Compassionate, concerned blue eyes, and he blinked away the tears angrily. Why was he thinking about that waterbending wench?

Why…why had she offered to help?

She wasn't supposed to help him, or his uncle. They were enemies, forsworn from the moment of birth, and she hated him, and he hated her. She hated him because he was from the Fire Nation. He hated her because she bested him in battle, and because she was part of the reason the Avatar kept eluding his grasp.

Suddenly, he was whisked back to a memory, long ago. He had fallen while playing soldier, scraped his knee. He had cried, and his mother had come running. "Shh, Zuko," she'd said, her long, raven-black hair falling over her shoulders as she'd bent down. "It's going to be okay. Everything's going to be alright. It's just a little scratch."

He had looked up at her, and he remembered her eyes – golden, but with the same compassion that the waterbender peasant's blue ones held – and he had felt safe and comforted.

He shook his head, angry with himself, as he pulled his uncle slowly towards a nearby abandoned house. He didn't need the waterbender. It was his mother's job to protect him, to comfort him, not the peasant's. He didn't need anyone else.

But the waterbender had actually seemed worried about his uncle. She actually _cared. _She _wanted_ to help, and Zuko had seen it in her eyes. She cared about two of the people who had been hunting her and her companions for the past year.

She was weak. Weak to give her compassion so freely. She shouldn't have offered to help. She wasn't supposed to have offered. She was supposed to hate him and his uncle, and walk away without saying anything, and leave him –

But she hadn't. None of them had.

_They're all weak,_ he screamed in his head. _Weak! They care too much. Caring makes you soft, makes you weak. And the waterbender, she's the weakest. She wanted to help me, her enemy. Why would she want to help…_

He pulled his uncle into a small bedroll on the ground in the old house and tried to get the shirt off of his uncle's chest. Maybe he should have accepted their help – how was he going to take care of his uncle alone?

He slapped himself mentally, suddenly angry again, and growled. No! Accepting her help, their help, would be a sign of weakness! He couldn't show any weakness to them, not when they were the enemy. They would use his weakness, take advantage of it.

As he scrounged around the house, finding only a few moth-eaten blankets and bowls and spoons, he looked at his uncle, and he remembered an incident, a couple years back, during the first year of his banishment.

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_They had found an injured dragonhawk, bleeding to death, on a coast. It had been shot by an arrow that Zuko had recognized as a Yu Yan arrow, and his uncle had put it out of its misery. He maintained a stoic and impassive exterior, but on the inside, he felt the dragonhawk's pain and misery as if it were his own. He hid it from his uncle well, or so he thought._

_That night, his uncle had walked up beside him as he was meditating. "You know, Zuko," he began in that slow and steady voice, "caring is not a bad thing."_

_He had growled at his uncle. "Caring is weakness!" he'd yelled, punching the air in front of him and narrowly missing the helmsman who dodged to the side to avoid the jet of flames that had erupted. "Showing that you care makes you weak. I'm not weak, Uncle!"_

_His uncle had stepped back, smiling gently. "It is no weakness, my nephew, and you are not weak. It is easy to hate, to not feel anything, to not do anything. But showing that you care means that you are strong enough to." And with that, he had left, leaving a fuming firebender on the deck._

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At that time, he considered it just another stupid thing that his uncle would say to try to calm him down.

But now…

He ran out to the water pump outside the house, praying that it would work, and ready to cry in relief when it did, and cold, clear water splashed sloppily into the bowl he held.

_Water. She's a waterbender…_

He blinked. _Why am I thinking of the waterbender? She's just a weak little girl who was naïve enough to offer help to her enemy…_

She was weaker than he was. He did everything without help from anyone, and she probably had all the help she ever could get from the Avatar and that doddering Water Tribe idiot. Was he her brother? He was better than her, because he had grown up without depending on Azula, and she had grown up depending on her brother. He was better than her, because he had to work to get anything he wanted, anything he deserved. She was with the Avatar. She could probably walk into town and receive gifts and free meals. He…he was better than her. Stronger than her.

He thought back to what his uncle had said. Could it be that what he said held true? He realized that he did care for his uncle, much more than he let on. He realized that he _needed_ his uncle, and he didn't realize it until after his uncle had been shot with lightning.

Maybe _he _was the weak one for not caring. Maybe by showing that he cared now, he would become stronger. Because he was not weak. He couldn't be weak.

With a jolt, he realized that his uncle had cared for him for the past three years, and all he had ever done was to scorn it in favor of his father's acceptance.

Maybe by showing that he cared now, he would earn his uncle's respect and forgiveness, and maybe…

He lit a fire in the decrepit fireplace in the house and heated the water, ripping the blankets into long pieces of linen and cotton. As soon as the water boiled, he cleaned the strips of cloth and hurried to tend to his uncle, wrapping the makeshift bandages around his torso.

He would show his uncle that he was strong, and that he was not weak. Maybe his uncle would forgive him for everything he'd ever said to him, and maybe his uncle would live. And…

A pair of compassion-filled, sapphire eyes came to mind.

And maybe, just maybe…she was better than he, because she was strong enough to care.

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